The Speed of Firefox 5.0

I’m a Google Chromium (right now version 12.0.742.91) user because of the speed. I found previous versions of Firefox to be just a little too slow. Especially when starting the browser. Through the grapevine I heard people discussing the better speeds of Firefox 5.0, which was released this week. This makes me re-consider using Firefox as my default browser. I took a look at the speed and several of the new features. Here are the results.

Note: I’m using a modest desktop setup running Linux Mint 11. Firefox 5.0 may behave differently on your machine. These are just some notes of my trial use of Firefox 5.0 over only a few hours.

Speed – Chromium wins at start up. It’s just faster for me. Another thing I noticed was that Firefox loads the majority of the page before displaying anything. While Chromium starts displaying the page top to bottom immediately. Sometimes text shows up first and images load after. Firefox 5.0 loads all at once. I don’t like this because it causes that blank white page that appears while loading a page to show for longer. I want to dive right in and start reading, I’ll look over the pictures in a few seconds or whatever it takes.

Features – Firefox 5.0 has over 1,000 improvements and performance enhancements. Here is a full list of features.